After the End, Before the Beginning
by Lascylla
Summary: He visits her in dreams, makes the same request night after night. She is tired of refusing him, but she will never give in - after all, he doesn't want her to. [Solas/Female Lavellan]


A/N: A prologue, I suppose. Bloody Solas (less than slash 3)

Even in her dreams she has only one arm, now. It's almost as though from the beginning, when the mark took hold of her, she had felt it gone already. An alien attachment that no longer truly belonged to her. The loss of it jostles her psyche less than she would have expected.

The fade wisps around her sleeping mind in a comforting haze, dreamy and warm, stuffing her insides with cotton wool to hold all her pieces in place. She wistfully directs her thoughts away from the unceasing hurt, schools her dream into something that could never contain a wolf. City streets, taverns, markets. Anything that will keep him at bay.

She doesn't know if it is really him, watching her in her dreams, or if it is simply her mind conjuring a shadow of him to gently unpick the knitting edges of the wound. It would not do for her to forget, after all, to begin to heal.

The crowded marketplace is emptying as people head inside. She should not be alone outside. That's where wolves are. She hastens towards a tavern, hazily brushing past people in her hurry. As she moves they disappear around her, dissolving into drifts of dust at her touch, at the landing of her eyes on them.

No.

She cannot be caught outside on her own. But as is common in dreams, control slips through her grasp, and she is abruptly alone. The doors are all closed and she knows without knocking that no one will answer her pleas for help, for shelter from the wolf.

She is weak. So weak. If she could only summon the strength of will to truly hate him, this wouldn't keep happening night after night. Sensationless tears slip down her cheeks without her permission, and she knows when she turns around he will be there. Waiting.

A fluttery sigh shudders from her chest, and she slowly revolves on the spot, shoulders hunched, eyes downcast. It doesn't matter whether she turns or not; as soon as she acknowledged this inevitability, it was over.

She slowly raises her eyes, squinting as though half shielding her eyes, as though if she only sees him a little then it won't hurt so badly.

He is so very different now. What he had done in the year before his imprisonment she cannot say, cannot even guess at, in truth; but whatever it was, it changed him.

His eye sockets are empty, like black holes in his skull, offering a glimpse into the endless darkness contained within. There are galaxies in there, ancient and abandoned, but glowing with distant light. They have reason to hope, now that he has found them.

His skin is stretched taut; he is more gaunt than lean now. Pale, strained. As though despite his almost emaciated state there is almost too much of him to be contained by his skin. Physical form no longer suits him.

But he is still him. Pointed chin, strong jaw, high cheekbones. Upswept ears and narrow, deeply expressive eyes.

"Vhenan, release me," he murmurs, and it is like hearing the great stone beneath the earth grind against itself. Like tectonic plates shifting restlessly against one another. Like he could break the world apart just by speaking the right words.

She squeezes her eyes shut, her hands in fists that press against her ears. She cannot hear this again! Every time he asks, a little more of her resolve breaks off and is swept away under the swell of his endless persistence.

He is trapped somewhere, buried under mountains of rock and magic and lyrium. It had taken an alliance of magisters, dwarves, templars, and any mage who would volunteer their help to trap him. Miles of runed stone, flooded with magic suppressing lyrium, a hundred activated elven artifacts embedded in the rock to hold back the fade, dozens of templars calling down a thunderous holy smite in absolute unison upon the body and spirit of the wolf, and a loose alliance of magisters and circle mages erecting a spherical barrier around it all. It is the ultimate prison.

But he is hurting. Starving, alone, full to the brim with some unknowable dark power that claws at his insides, trying to escape. He cannot enter the endless sleep with the cacophonous raging of whatever power he has taken into himself.

And so he comes to her in dreams, just a fragment of himself, what he can afford to tear away from the rest. She thinks he doesn't want to come to her, sometimes. As though some part of him knows he is precisely where he must be. As though he doesn't really want to escape at all, but he cannot just lay down and let the end wash over him, steal his breath and his mind and his spirit. The jangling, rattling, angry darkness in him will not relent.

So when he asks her, she can feel in the corners of his words, the shadows of his phrasing; he doesn't want her to give in. For him, she won't. She should be able to resist for the world, for her friends, for her clan. For herself. But in the end, it is the silent understanding that he does not want her to that stays her hand.

She steels herself against the peculiar agony of seeing him this way, and forces her eyes open. The sight of him hits her like a blow; he glows, an incandescent brilliance that halos his form, as though the darkness in him draws the light like a magnet draws iron. She grits her teeth so hard she thinks they might crack and, the fade being what it is, her stray thought is lent reality. Perforations snake through her molars with an crack that echoes in her skull like the sharpest roll of thunder, and her hand goes to her mouth as she cries out in pain.

He is beside her in a breath, gently easing her to the ground as her legs collapse beneath her. If only she could muster the strength to bend this dream to her will she could stop this madness, but her will is buried under a blanket of despair.

He murmurs a quiet stream of comforts, and she grips the fabric covering his forearm as her teeth begin to tear their way free of her gums. If only, if only, if only.

The pain of it wakes her, springs the lock on her dream and lets her bolt upright into consciousness.

It is still dark. She has become used to operating on only a few hours of broken sleep per night, stitching short bursts of unconsciousness together in a patchwork parody of genuine rest. Sera will scold her in the morning for the shadows beneath her eyes, but she cannot bring herself to close them again. The teeth were bad enough... but him. There. Being comforting and calling her vhenan; she can only handle so much of that particular brand of torture per night, and her quota is filled for now.

A/N: More coming, in a story called Nostrum. This is just the prologue.


End file.
